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A lot of the smog in Beijing comes from burning coal. Over the past few years, Beijing has ordered dozens of heavily polluting factories & power plants to shut
by tristanj 9y ago
A lot of the smog in Beijing comes from burning coal. Over the past few years, Beijing has ordered dozens of heavily polluting factories & power plants to shut down and move away from the city. I think Shanghai has done something similar. Combined with the push to discourage using coal for home heating, which is brought up in the article, air quality has improved in Beijing.
It is a shame though Beijing is mostly exporting their pollution elsewhere. China as a whole is still building more of those polluting coal fired power plants. China plans to increase their coal-fired generation capacity by nearly 20% over the next few years. Coal usage (and coal CO2 pollution) will increase and is projected to remain flat through 2030. Though the pollution will be out of sight from major cities. Guess they can't get enough of that cheap coal electricity.
- dis-sys 9y agoDid you read the article? "Pollution in Beijing and in 27 other cities in northeastern China has fallen precipitously, dropping 33 percent on average compared with the last three months of 2016." As stated by the article, the data has been verified by Greenpeace.
- Already__Taken 9y agoIs it possible to ban the export of coal power? If your country needs it then go forth. You just can't resell that power stations output internationally.
- hamandcheese 9y agoWho would enforce such a ban? The best you could realistically do is ban the import in your country. Is there even much international electricity trade occurring?
- mjlee 9y agoThere is in the EU: https://ec.europa.eu/energy/en/topics/infrastructure/projects-common-interest/electricity-interconnection-targets https://ec.europa.eu/energy/en/topics/infrastructure/project... `In October 2014, the European Council called for all EU countries to achieve interconnection of at least 10% of their installed electricity production capacity by 2020. This means that each country should have in place electricity cables that allow at least 10% of the electricity produced by its power plants to be transported across its borders to neighbouring countries. 17 countries are already on track to reach that target by 2020, or have already reached the target, but more interconnections are needed in some regions.`
- eloff 9y agoBecause the polluted air stays in your country? Anyway afaik electricity export is not a huge businesses internationally compared to domestic consumption.
- lmm 9y agoElectricity is fungible, so such a ban would make no difference in practice. China has enough non-coal plants that they could just say all the power they were exporting came from them.
- Already__Taken 9y agoIt would effectively take the form that if a country or maybe provider is generating coal power, they are unable to export any power. I'm not arguing this would fix everything, just adding direct negative to using coal. If you need coal to make your own country function, fine go ahead that's still a problem that exists.
- xbmcuser 9y agoWell they did bring it down 4% in all of China. Looking at the investments they are doing in solar and wind they are moving in the right direction is it fast enough is debatable though. But I do think because they are autocratic country once they decided to go for renewables they are moving a lot faster than most other countries.
- woodandsteel 9y agoFrom what I understand, last year they decided to continue all coal-fired electricity plants presently under construction, but cancel all the ones that were only in the planning stage. And China is making a very strong push on renewable energy and electric vehicles. China is a very big ocean liner, so it takes a long time to change direction, but it is definitely changing.